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From Apple’s own documentation for the “Delete and Report Junk” feature in Messages:

The sender’s information and the message are sent to Apple, and
the message is permanently deleted from your iPhone.

If you accidentally report and delete messages, you can
recover them.

Reporting junk or spam doesn’t prevent the sender from
sending messages, but you can block the number to stop
receiving them.

Via Andrew Leahey, responding to Marco Arment on Mastodon.

I’ve been inundated with spam text messages from Democratic political campaigns and PACs for the last year. I know why: because in the past, my wife and I have both contributed to Democratic political campaigns. I add my wife here, because for whatever reason, a good chunk of the political text message spam I get is addressed to “Amy” not me, and the opposite is true for her. But: every time I have ever contributed money to a political campaign — or to any charity — I pay close attention to any checkboxes allowing me to “opt out” of any further marketing communications. That doesn’t seem to matter. Stores and charities are pretty bad at honoring this, but political campaigns are the absolute worst.

For several months this year — while receiving, I’d say, around half a dozen such messages per day, every day, every week — I tried using Messages’s “Delete and Report Junk” feature. As far as I can tell it didn’t do a damn thing. Now that I see Apple’s own documentation, I can see why. Using this feature doesn’t even block the sender from sending more messages.

About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.

Two other observations:

Every single unwanted text message I’ve gotten in the past few years — every one — has been an SMS message, not iMessage. iMessage spam exists, but for me at least it’s a night-and-day difference from SMS. I fail to see how RCS won’t be just as bad or worse (because it supports larger images) than SMS in this regard. Apple should have let carrier-based messaging wither on the vine.
Almost every single text message this year sent to my personal phone number that I’d describe as “spam” was an attempt to get to me to contribute to a political campaign. I get random phishing texts sent to the public phone number I use for Signal and WhatsApp (which I encourage you to use to contact me, if you prefer, instead of email), but that’s to be expected, and those don’t come to Messages. It doesn’t feel like merely a minor inconvenience for having contributed to U.S. political campaigns in the past — it feels like punishment. Like anyone who gives to a political campaign is a sucker. It’s absolutely infuriating. I care deeply about U.S. politics, particularly in this ongoing Trump era, but these spam text messages absolutely have made me less willing to contribute money to campaigns and causes I believe in. Political consultants may well have analytics that show that these spams-to-people-who’ve-previously-donated-money-to-our-side “work”, but for me — and many of my friends — it has had the opposite effect. I’ve contributed significantly less money this year than in 2020 — and I now avoid ever donating small amounts to down-ballot campaigns — and the one and only reason why is that I’m annoyed that my previous contributions directly led Democratic campaigns and PACs to send me a zillion spam texts. Not only have I never, in my life, given a penny to any group whom I feel is spamming me, but this has made me gun-shy about contributing any money at all. I’ll never ever give out my actual phone number or email address to any political campaign ever again. They clearly have no respect for my time and attention. I think they’ve talked themselves into thinking this strategy “works” because it works for some of the previous donors they spam with new solicitations, but their analytics won’t show the people like me who just stop or greatly decrease their contributions without clicking any of their links. I suppose their analytics can count the “STOP” responses I’ve started sending, but I doubt they can correlate those “STOP”s with my drop-off in contributions.

 ★ 

From Apple’s own documentation for the “Delete and Report Junk” feature in Messages:

The sender’s information and the message are sent to Apple, and
the message is permanently deleted from your iPhone.

If you accidentally report and delete messages, you can
recover them.

Reporting junk or spam doesn’t prevent the sender from
sending messages, but you can block the number to stop
receiving them.

Via Andrew Leahey, responding to Marco Arment on Mastodon.

I’ve been inundated with spam text messages from Democratic political campaigns and PACs for the last year. I know why: because in the past, my wife and I have both contributed to Democratic political campaigns. I add my wife here, because for whatever reason, a good chunk of the political text message spam I get is addressed to “Amy” not me, and the opposite is true for her. But: every time I have ever contributed money to a political campaign — or to any charity — I pay close attention to any checkboxes allowing me to “opt out” of any further marketing communications. That doesn’t seem to matter. Stores and charities are pretty bad at honoring this, but political campaigns are the absolute worst.

For several months this year — while receiving, I’d say, around half a dozen such messages per day, every day, every week — I tried using Messages’s “Delete and Report Junk” feature. As far as I can tell it didn’t do a damn thing. Now that I see Apple’s own documentation, I can see why. Using this feature doesn’t even block the sender from sending more messages.

About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. But this has actually worked. Election season is heating up but I’m getting way way fewer political spam texts now. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the “STOP” response works.

Two other observations:

Every single unwanted text message I’ve gotten in the past few years — every one — has been an SMS message, not iMessage. iMessage spam exists, but for me at least it’s a night-and-day difference from SMS. I fail to see how RCS won’t be just as bad or worse (because it supports larger images) than SMS in this regard. Apple should have let carrier-based messaging wither on the vine.

Almost every single text message this year sent to my personal phone number that I’d describe as “spam” was an attempt to get to me to contribute to a political campaign. I get random phishing texts sent to the public phone number I use for Signal and WhatsApp (which I encourage you to use to contact me, if you prefer, instead of email), but that’s to be expected, and those don’t come to Messages. It doesn’t feel like merely a minor inconvenience for having contributed to U.S. political campaigns in the past — it feels like punishment. Like anyone who gives to a political campaign is a sucker. It’s absolutely infuriating. I care deeply about U.S. politics, particularly in this ongoing Trump era, but these spam text messages absolutely have made me less willing to contribute money to campaigns and causes I believe in. Political consultants may well have analytics that show that these spams-to-people-who’ve-previously-donated-money-to-our-side “work”, but for me — and many of my friends — it has had the opposite effect. I’ve contributed significantly less money this year than in 2020 — and I now avoid ever donating small amounts to down-ballot campaigns — and the one and only reason why is that I’m annoyed that my previous contributions directly led Democratic campaigns and PACs to send me a zillion spam texts. Not only have I never, in my life, given a penny to any group whom I feel is spamming me, but this has made me gun-shy about contributing any money at all. I’ll never ever give out my actual phone number or email address to any political campaign ever again. They clearly have no respect for my time and attention. I think they’ve talked themselves into thinking this strategy “works” because it works for some of the previous donors they spam with new solicitations, but their analytics won’t show the people like me who just stop or greatly decrease their contributions without clicking any of their links. I suppose their analytics can count the “STOP” responses I’ve started sending, but I doubt they can correlate those “STOP”s with my drop-off in contributions.

Read More 

New Mac app that turns rewriting Git history entries from a chore into a breeze. Scroll down a bit on their home page to see just how much simpler Retcon makes edits compared to the Git CLI or other Git clients. Scroll down even more for the cleverly-named “cheatsheet you won’t need”.

 ★ 

New Mac app that turns rewriting Git history entries from a chore into a breeze. Scroll down a bit on their home page to see just how much simpler Retcon makes edits compared to the Git CLI or other Git clients. Scroll down even more for the cleverly-named “cheatsheet you won’t need”.

Read More 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

Sharing a little of my own data here: I’ve self-published my own
short stories across most major ebook market places. Amazon
makes up the bulk of those downloads and sales — 53 percent and
66 percent, respectively. Apple comes in a solid second place in
sales, with 21 percent, and third place in downloads with 11
percent. My literary agency has also published my novel All
Souls Lost in ebook across those platforms, and Apple Books
sales are also in second there, accounting for 18 percent of sales
to 63 percent for Amazon.

I suspect my numbers are probably skewed by the fact that my
audience — that’s you all reading this, in large part — are
overrepresented by users of Apple products. That said, to my eyes,
Apple has managed to achieve itself a comfortable, if distant
second place in ebooks without really spending much in the way of
time and effort. Which perhaps explains why they’re looking to cut
costs and reduce focus — if the business works “fine” as is, then
why invest more?

My disappointment stems from the fact that Apple is better
positioned and equipped than anyone else in the industry to take
on Amazon head-to-head in ebooks. But doing so would require the
company to do something different.

 ★ 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

Sharing a little of my own data here: I’ve self-published my own
short stories across most major ebook market places. Amazon
makes up the bulk of those downloads and sales — 53 percent and
66 percent, respectively. Apple comes in a solid second place in
sales, with 21 percent, and third place in downloads with 11
percent. My literary agency has also published my novel All
Souls Lost in ebook across those platforms, and Apple Books
sales are also in second there, accounting for 18 percent of sales
to 63 percent for Amazon.

I suspect my numbers are probably skewed by the fact that my
audience — that’s you all reading this, in large part — are
overrepresented by users of Apple products. That said, to my eyes,
Apple has managed to achieve itself a comfortable, if distant
second place in ebooks without really spending much in the way of
time and effort. Which perhaps explains why they’re looking to cut
costs and reduce focus — if the business works “fine” as is, then
why invest more?

My disappointment stems from the fact that Apple is better
positioned and equipped than anyone else in the industry to take
on Amazon head-to-head in ebooks. But doing so would require the
company to do something different.

Read More 

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer:

Telegram is often described as an “encrypted” messenger. But as
Ben Thompson explains today, Telegram is not end-to-end
encrypted, as rivals WhatsApp and Signal are. (Its “secret chat”
feature is end-to-end encrypted, but it is not enabled on chats
by default. The vast majority of chats on Telegram are not secret
chats.) That means Telegram can look at the contents of private
messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for
that data.

Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of
jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says)
none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ
again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption,
Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is
stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are
controlled by different legal entities spread across different
jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts
and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As
a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are
required to force us to give up any data. To this day, we
have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including
governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram
is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM. (To take only the
most recent example, here’s one from India’s Decode last
month, which like others found that criminals often
advertise their wares on Instagram and direct buyers to Telegram
to complete their purchases.) […]

“Telegram is another level,” Brian Fishman, Meta’s former
anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. “It has
been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its
ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It’s
not ‘light’ content moderation; it’s a different approach
entirely.

From the Ben Thompson piece yesterday that Newton links to above, is this description of just how unusual Telegram’s “secret chats” are:

That is why “encryption” in the context of messaging means
end-to-end encryption; this means that your messages are encrypted
on your device and can only ever be decrypted and thus read by
your intended recipient. Telegram does support this with “Secret
Chats”, but these are not the default. Moreover, Telegram’s
implementation has a lot of oddities, including some non-standard
encryption techniques, the fact that secret chats can only be
between two devices (not two accounts, so you can’t access a
secret chat started on your phone from your computer), and that
both users have to be online at the same time to initiate a secret
chat (I’ll come back to these oddities in a moment).

 ★ 

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer:

Telegram is often described as an “encrypted” messenger. But as
Ben Thompson explains today, Telegram is not end-to-end
encrypted, as rivals WhatsApp and Signal are. (Its “secret chat”
feature is end-to-end encrypted, but it is not enabled on chats
by default. The vast majority of chats on Telegram are not secret
chats.) That means Telegram can look at the contents of private
messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for
that data.

Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of
jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says)
none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ
again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption,
Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is
stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are
controlled by different legal entities spread across different
jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts
and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As
a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are
required to force us to give up any data. […] To this day, we
have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including
governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram
is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM. (To take only the
most recent example, here’s one from India’s Decode last
month, which like others found that criminals often
advertise their wares on Instagram and direct buyers to Telegram
to complete their purchases.) […]

“Telegram is another level,” Brian Fishman, Meta’s former
anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. “It has
been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its
ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It’s
not ‘light’ content moderation; it’s a different approach
entirely.

From the Ben Thompson piece yesterday that Newton links to above, is this description of just how unusual Telegram’s “secret chats” are:

That is why “encryption” in the context of messaging means
end-to-end encryption; this means that your messages are encrypted
on your device and can only ever be decrypted and thus read by
your intended recipient. Telegram does support this with “Secret
Chats”, but these are not the default. Moreover, Telegram’s
implementation has a lot of oddities, including some non-standard
encryption techniques, the fact that secret chats can only be
between two devices (not two accounts, so you can’t access a
secret chat started on your phone from your computer), and that
both users have to be online at the same time to initiate a secret
chat (I’ll come back to these oddities in a moment).

Read More 

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri
will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will
continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including
information systems and technology, information security, and real
estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part
of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of
Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial
Officer and join the executive team.

 ★ 

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri
will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will
continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including
information systems and technology, information security, and real
estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part
of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of
Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial
Officer and join the executive team.

Read More 

Matthew Ball has written an excellent deep-dive into Roblox:

Compared to its most similar competitors — the social virtual
world platforms, Minecraft and Fortnite — Roblox has about 5× and
2.25× as many monthly players. For non-gamers, Roblox has about
two thirds as many monthly users as Spotify and half as many as
Snap (though it probably has a lower share of daily-to-monthly
active users) and is roughly as popular as Instagram circa Q4
2015, and Facebook in Q3 2009.

Each month, players spend close to six billion hours using Roblox.
This time excludes the viewing of Roblox content on Twitch or
YouTube, the largest video platform on earth and which counts
non-live gaming content as its second most popular genre, with
Roblox one of its five most watched games. Most estimates suggest
the average Disney+ account watches no more than 20 hours per
month, which would mean about 3.1 billion hours in total monthly
watch time — barely half of Roblox’s total.

But:

So yes, Roblox is unquestionably “working.” Yet Roblox is also
unprofitable. Very unprofitable. What’s more, Roblox’s losses
continue to swell because its impressive rate of revenue growth
has been outpaced by that of its costs. […] Over the last twelve
months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.

 ★ 

Matthew Ball has written an excellent deep-dive into Roblox:

Compared to its most similar competitors — the social virtual
world platforms, Minecraft and Fortnite — Roblox has about 5× and
2.25× as many monthly players. For non-gamers, Roblox has about
two thirds as many monthly users as Spotify and half as many as
Snap (though it probably has a lower share of daily-to-monthly
active users) and is roughly as popular as Instagram circa Q4
2015, and Facebook in Q3 2009.

Each month, players spend close to six billion hours using Roblox.
This time excludes the viewing of Roblox content on Twitch or
YouTube, the largest video platform on earth and which counts
non-live gaming content as its second most popular genre, with
Roblox one of its five most watched games. Most estimates suggest
the average Disney+ account watches no more than 20 hours per
month, which would mean about 3.1 billion hours in total monthly
watch time — barely half of Roblox’s total.

But:

So yes, Roblox is unquestionably “working.” Yet Roblox is also
unprofitable. Very unprofitable. What’s more, Roblox’s losses
continue to swell because its impressive rate of revenue growth
has been outpaced by that of its costs. […] Over the last twelve
months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.

Read More 

Chris Welch, in a thread on Threads:

The “Reimagine” feature on Google’s new Pixel 9 lineup is
incredible. It’s so impressive that testing it has left me feeling
uneasy on multiple occasions.

With a simple prompt, you can add things to photos that were never
there. And the company’s Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly
realistic. This all happens right from the phone’s default photo
editor app. In about five seconds.

Are we ready to go down this path? Now that the embargo has
lifted, let me show you some examples. Buckle up.

The images you’ll see in this thread are all straight out of
Google Photos after going through Reimagine / Magic Editor. They
were never touched up by Photoshop or Lightroom.

On the one hand, this technology becoming ubiquitous feels inevitable. On the hand, these examples from Welch are horrifying.

At The Verge, Jess Weatherbed writes:

Just because you have the estimable ability to clock when an
image is fake doesn’t mean everyone can. Not everyone skulks
around on tech forums (we love you all, fellow skulkers), so the
typical indicators of AI that seem obvious to us can be easy to
miss for those who don’t know what signs to look for — if they’re
even there at all. AI is rapidly getting better at producing
natural-looking images that don’t have seven fingers or
Cronenberg-esque distortions.

Maybe it was easy to spot when the occasional deepfake was
dumped into our feeds, but the scale of production has shifted
seismically in the last two years alone. It’s incredibly easy to
make this stuff, so now it’s fucking everywhere. We are
dangerously close to living in a world in which we have
to be wary about being deceived by every single image put in
front of us.

That’s seemingly where we’re headed. Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.

 ★ 

Chris Welch, in a thread on Threads:

The “Reimagine” feature on Google’s new Pixel 9 lineup is
incredible. It’s so impressive that testing it has left me feeling
uneasy on multiple occasions.

With a simple prompt, you can add things to photos that were never
there. And the company’s Gemini AI makes it look astonishingly
realistic. This all happens right from the phone’s default photo
editor app. In about five seconds.

Are we ready to go down this path? Now that the embargo has
lifted, let me show you some examples. Buckle up.

The images you’ll see in this thread are all straight out of
Google Photos after going through Reimagine / Magic Editor. They
were never touched up by Photoshop or Lightroom.

On the one hand, this technology becoming ubiquitous feels inevitable. On the hand, these examples from Welch are horrifying.

At The Verge, Jess Weatherbed writes:

Just because you have the estimable ability to clock when an
image is fake doesn’t mean everyone can. Not everyone skulks
around on tech forums (we love you all, fellow skulkers), so the
typical indicators of AI that seem obvious to us can be easy to
miss for those who don’t know what signs to look for — if they’re
even there at all. AI is rapidly getting better at producing
natural-looking images that don’t have seven fingers or
Cronenberg-esque distortions.

Maybe it was easy to spot when the occasional deepfake was
dumped into our feeds, but the scale of production has shifted
seismically in the last two years alone. It’s incredibly easy to
make this stuff, so now it’s fucking everywhere. We are
dangerously close to living in a world in which we have
to be wary about being deceived by every single image put in
front of us.

That’s seemingly where we’re headed. Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.

Read More 

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge last week:

If you want the old Sonos app back, it’s not coming. In a Reddit
AMA response posted Tuesday, Sonos CEO Spence says that he
was hopeful “until very recently” that the company could
rerelease the app, confirming a report from The Verge that
the company was considering doing so. But after testing that
option, rereleasing the old app would apparently make things
worse, Spence says.

Since the new app was released on May 7th, Spence has issued a
formal apology and announced in August that the company
would be delaying the launch of two products “until our app
experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and
our partners expect from Sonos.”

Here’s Spence’s explanation as to why it can’t bring back the
old app:

The trick of course is that Sonos is not just the mobile app,
but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too. In
the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating
the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the
point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what
you remember. After doing extensive testing we’ve reluctantly
concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse,
not better. I’m sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing
to me.

The new Sonos app is looking more and more like an entry for the Unpopular Redesigns Hall of Fame.

 ★ 

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge last week:

If you want the old Sonos app back, it’s not coming. In a Reddit
AMA response posted Tuesday, Sonos CEO Spence says that he
was hopeful “until very recently” that the company could
rerelease the app, confirming a report from The Verge that
the company was considering doing so. But after testing that
option, rereleasing the old app would apparently make things
worse, Spence says.

Since the new app was released on May 7th, Spence has issued a
formal apology and announced in August that the company
would be delaying the launch of two products “until our app
experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and
our partners expect from Sonos.”

Here’s Spence’s explanation as to why it can’t bring back the
old app:

The trick of course is that Sonos is not just the mobile app,
but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too. In
the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating
the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the
point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what
you remember. After doing extensive testing we’ve reluctantly
concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse,
not better. I’m sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing
to me.

The new Sonos app is looking more and more like an entry for the Unpopular Redesigns Hall of Fame.

Read More 

Faruk Korkmaz, on his iPhonedo YouTube channel:

Shot on iPhone 15 Pro Max. No gimbal, extra lens or filter is
used. I shot all the footage using the stock camera app to an
external drive in ProRes format. Edited in Final Cut Pro X. I put
this video together from over 1000 video clips I shot between
September 2023 and August 2024.

A lovely little 3-minute film on its own, and a great source of inspiration showing how good footage can look from a modern iPhone.

 ★ 

Faruk Korkmaz, on his iPhonedo YouTube channel:

Shot on iPhone 15 Pro Max. No gimbal, extra lens or filter is
used. I shot all the footage using the stock camera app to an
external drive in ProRes format. Edited in Final Cut Pro X. I put
this video together from over 1000 video clips I shot between
September 2023 and August 2024.

A lovely little 3-minute film on its own, and a great source of inspiration showing how good footage can look from a modern iPhone.

Read More 

Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, writing for The New York Times:

This summer, I agreed to a literary experiment with Times Opinion:
What is the difference between a story written by a human and a
story written by artificial intelligence?

We decided to hold a contest between ChatGPT and me, to see who
could write — or “write” — a better beach read. I thought going
head-to-head with the machine would give us real answers about
what A.I. is and isn’t currently capable of and, of course, how
big a threat it is to human writers. And if you’ve wondered, as I
have, what exactly makes something a beach read — frothy themes
or sand under your feet? — we set out to get to the bottom of
that, too. […]

As for the results of the contest — which one was the better
story — I invite you to be the judge. My story and ChatGPT’s
story are below. Read to the bottom to find out which is which.

I guessed correctly, and was pretty sure about my guess. But not certain. And without question, I enjoyed Sittenfeld’s story more.

 ★ 

Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, writing for The New York Times:

This summer, I agreed to a literary experiment with Times Opinion:
What is the difference between a story written by a human and a
story written by artificial intelligence?

We decided to hold a contest between ChatGPT and me, to see who
could write — or “write” — a better beach read. I thought going
head-to-head with the machine would give us real answers about
what A.I. is and isn’t currently capable of and, of course, how
big a threat it is to human writers. And if you’ve wondered, as I
have, what exactly makes something a beach read — frothy themes
or sand under your feet? — we set out to get to the bottom of
that, too. […]

As for the results of the contest — which one was the better
story — I invite you to be the judge. My story and ChatGPT’s
story are below. Read to the bottom to find out which is which.

I guessed correctly, and was pretty sure about my guess. But not certain. And without question, I enjoyed Sittenfeld’s story more.

Read More